Hillary Clinton will be the next US president

Hillary Clinton, who has finally secured the Democratic nomination for US president, may be the most unpopular frontrunner in the history of US politics. Despite scandals, low poll ratings and the disloyalty of her own Democratic party she seems certain to claim the White House in November. So what - or who - has galvanised this coalition of the unwilling behind her? (Hint: he has mad hair...)

Barring the unknowable and unspeakable (more on that later), Hillary Clinton will be, in what I think is virtually every reasonable person's estimation, the president of the United States a year from now. This near certainty and rare political foreknowledge has so far got relatively little attention because the Donald Trump show (and possible apocalypse) is so much more compelling - a circumstance that transcends mere tedious politics. And, too, because Clinton's inevitability continues to seem like bitter medicine. It may even be fair to argue that it's Hillary Clinton who has made Trump possible: that Donald is the last gasp of political uncertainty and thrills before a certain and cheerless Clinton takeover.

She is, as polls regularly remind us, one of the most disliked and distrusted people in the United States, her name curdling good humour and milk everywhere. The US electorate, quite pointedly, did not elect her once before when the election seemed hers for the taking. If she is electable, she is, too, rejectable.

It is one of the things that makes people recoil from her: she can't take the hint. It's stomach-turning to witness someone who is so constantly vilified. Certainly Clinton is not one of those people who carries enmity with a jaunty joie de guerre (one of the decidedly Trump virtues).

To look at her is to have a pretty good idea of her pain. Enduring a public life of humiliation and hatred has rather become her calling card and leitmotif: I can take anything you can dish out. Or, really, I can survive anything you can dish out - as one might survive the cruellest torture, marked forever. It is, in the end, part of what we who admire her admire her for, however begrudgingly.

She has been crucified and risen from the dead many times. For all the Republicans who curse her for not being brought down by what surely would have brought more ordinary politicians down - and who assume that she could only have survived on the strength of dastardly conspiracies and Faustian deals - there will be more Democrats who understand that by the mere fact of not being brought down, she deserves to win, or if not deserves, at least defaults to the win. You have to give it to her. She's just unkillable. If on 8 November she is still standing (and beyond the unknowable and unspeakable, she seems certain to be), she wins, having exhausted everybody.

Hillary with her inner circle, Center For American Progress co-founder John Podesta, and the Center's president Neera Tanden, 24 October 2015

She will take with her into the White House a band of retainers and loyalists who, like her, reflect a survivor's view, which roughly translates as, "We have been sorely tried and tested and, with the greatest fortitude, have proven that we are different from other mere political mortals, so f*** you."

It is another thing that so infuriates Clinton opponents as well as the political culture in general: the Clintons function as a world apart. You are a member of the Clinton club, for which you have to prove yourself and, in some sense, be born into, or you are not.

The Clintons are one of the most closed political organisations operating in America today. It is a kind of secret society. It's a strict, if often dysfunctional, extended family: our experience as Clinton loyalists, the most existential and embattled folk in American political life, is unlike any other, so don't ever try to pull rank on us or to assume you can ever truly be one of us. It's all very Mafia. One of the frustrations of the Republicans is that they have been mostly unsuccessful in equating the word Clinton with Mafia, which, to them, seems so head-smackingly obvious.

The historical point can hardly be missed (although it often is), that the age of killer politics, of take-no-prisoner politics, of politics being war instead of professional calling, begins with the us-against-them fatalism of the Clintons. The fact that Hillary's election will be a restitution of the Clinton White House, wholly subsuming impeachment, shame, excess and, to boot, vindicating Hillary Clinton's own personal mortification and victimisation, adds further psycho-political drama to what is sure to be a powerful revenge opera. More prosaically, it is always payback time with the Clintons.

The Hillary inner circle, notable not just for its loyalty to her, but her's to its members, certainly comprises a frightening list of resentments, grudges, bitter memories, sycophantic loyalty, personal survival stories - that is, Clinton business as usual.

There is Huma Abedin, whose professional-personal relationship with Clinton is so complex - crossing over State Department, campaign and Clinton Foundation lines - that no org chart could accurately describe the nature of the relationship or Abedin's actual job function at any point in their long history. Perhaps most notably, Hillary and Huma are united in the weird shaming ritual of modern politics. Abedin is the wife of Anthony Weiner, the former congressman run out of office for sending penis pictures across social media.

Then Cheryl Mills, whose promising career as a young lawyer began with the Clintons, and might reasonably, over the almost 20 years since she came to prominent notice, have turned her into a leading legal or business figure. Instead she has remained a Clinton functionary. Her forays into the wider professional world, in media and education, seem only to have served to draw her back to the Clinton flame. The Clintons are her one and only real client.

And Sidney Blumenthal, the political journalist who found his way into the first Clinton administration, and became central to it through his access to Hillary, in particular. For more than 25 years, he's been hatchet man, whisperer and courtier, often making almost Zelig-like appearances in the various Clinton legal messes. Christopher Hitchens accused him of perjuring himself over press leaks about Monica Lewinsky, getting him hauled before congress.

Last year, hauledbefore congress again, his emails and testimony became aprime evidentiary point in both the Benghazi (a 2012 attack on US diplomats in Libya) and the Clinton email scandals. Notably, when Hillary Clinton became secretary of state the Obama administration specifically forbade her to bring Blumenthal with her. Hence, he went on the Clinton Foundation payroll, from where he continued to advise her.

The highest echelon of her campaign operatives represent the closed society of Clinton professionals: Mandy Grunwald, John Podesta, Jennifer Palmieri, Neera Tanden and several dozen more have not so much made their careers in politics, as made their careers as Clinton people.

On the other hand, having spent time either in the White House or in the long-term shadow administration, they are professionals, quite a unique condition among the many White House staffs of recent years (George W Bush hired professionals such as Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, but they were so much more professional than him that it often seemed there were multiple presidents).

As much as Clinton offers neither inspiration nor excitement, there is, for many, something of a secret hope that maybe, immersed in a life of political intrigue and deadly power games, she has actually learned something. We've made an investment in Clinton, so we might as well reap the rewards. Clintonism represents a body of experience, however low and grubby, that reflects the cold reality of American politics. There can not be, for the Clintons, many illusions left.

Indeed, as the larger political parties have increasingly broken into distinctive subsets, the Clintons have come to represent a separate party within the Democratic party. The virtue, to some, is that the Clinton subset, quite different from most others, is not ideologically driven. That's another point of critical frustration for a good part of the political world: as ideology has become the modern political driver, it is the Clintons, believing practically speaking in nothing but themselves, who prevail. Or at least keep going - and going. That view of politics as a tawdry, cynical affair, designed entirely to perpetuate itself, which has in part resulted in the counter- offensive of ideological purity, is perhaps most specifically a view of the Clintons.

That's what the Clintons are hated for, and yet, the possibility that what you see is what you get is in many ways a good alternative to Obama's "what you got was not what you bargained for at all".

Joined by husband President Bill Clinton and singer Katy Perry, Hillary Clinton holds a campaign rally in Des Moines, Iowa, 24 October 2015

Curiously, many Democrats have acceded to Clintonism not because of their cold practicality and political professionalism, but because the Clintons are the sworn enemy of the right. The Clintons, in other words, while hardly being left, have been defined as the opposite of being right - the enemy of my enemy being my friend.

That's largely been true up until now - but this is where we enter the territory of the unknowable. The most characteristic aspects of the Clintons, a political couple who might otherwise largely see themselves as practical-minded centrist consensus builders, is, of course, how much personal hatred they inspire. While that has seemed to be most virulently a right-wing phenomenon, heretofore uniting the Democrats around them, Clinton-hate has now emerged as a powerful emotion on the left.

It's almost a binary break - this sizeable part of the Democratic party, as much in some polls as 30 per cent, that cannot abide her. That is one disadvantage of a virtually unchallenged campaign. There is no process for arriving at a decision to actually accept her, to weigh her virtues as greater than her failings. Rather, in a display of all the worst aspects of Clintonism, Hillary Clinton is a fait accompli. History, or the fates - aka, some deep, insidious power dynamic - has let her avoid a competitive race.

What is the left to do? Bend or bolt. So far during this election, the left, first in its flirtation with Massachusetts senator and anti-Wall Streeter Elizabeth Warren, and then with socialist candidate Bernie Sanders, has headed ever more left. It almost seems that the more efforts Clinton makes to move left, the farther the left moves - just to get away from her. Hence, the left becomes more polarised in its anti-Clintonism, leaving Hillary, herself having moved with some desperation significantly left, more vulnerable.

In a volatile election - to make quite an understatement - with ten months to go, and with at least six months of maximum volatility remaining, what are the chances that the left, sharpened and emboldened by its anti-Hillaryism, will organise an insurgent independent-party campaign against her? As bending becomes more and more distasteful and antithetical, bolting becomes more and more possible and logical.

The unspeakable, and, even now, practically unimaginable, is that Donald Trump will be the Republican candidate. While the continuing assumption is that the out-of-control Republican train will be brought to a safe stop, the train-wreck scenario is now equally plausible. Trump as the candidate, with his uncanny powers of embodying whatever most represents anger and negativity, becomes the ultimate Clinton hater, the anti-Hillary embodiment.

If, on the other side, the left continues to find its raison d'être in Clinton hatred then, in an extraordinary demonstration of democracy's weakness, Hillary's intolerable inevitability could actually make Donald Trump president. But this could also mean that the Clintons will be able to assemble a fantastic coalition of the reasonable, fair-minded and emotionally sound, both Democrats and Republicans, that will have no choice but to turn to the Clintons as the only people who can stand in the way of national disgrace and absurdity, confirming, once again, that Clintonism is, however infuriating, the only practical and successful idea in American politics.